On Tue, 18 Jul 2006 19:05:40 +0200, mienis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Dear Umit,
>I don't have any other explanation for it.
>At the Natufian site of En Malaha (about 10-9 thousand years ago), on the
>west bank of the former Hula swamps in Upper Galilee, Israel, we had
besides
>the local land- and freshwater molluscs marine molluscs from the
>Mediterranean Sea and Red Sea, freshwater bivalves from the Nile, in Egypt
>and pliocene freshwater snails from a site at the border of Turkey and
>Syria! A similar site in the Eastern part of Syria produced shell beads
made
>from freshwater molluscs from the Sea of Galilee, a few kilometers from En
>Malaha.
>Already during those days and even much earlier (see the recent paper in
>Science) trade was already well developed even over large distance. The
site
>in Algiers was at least 190 km from the nearest shore!
>Regards,
>Henk
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "umit" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 5:47 PM
>Subject: Re: 100,000 year old shell beads
>
>
>>
>> How could the Indian Ocean species have reached the archaeologcail sites.
>> It
>> is an evidence for trade?
>
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Dear Henk
Many thanks for your extra details about the Natufian shell beads you've
found in the Levant.
I can understand the cowries - I never found any moneta or annulus while
diving at Aqaba, but I think I still have some erosa from there and Jeddah.
I understood that the Mediterranean had no real cowries at all, until I
found some C. lurida (I think) on a beach in Majorca.
I assume those, or erosa, were the shells used for the eyes in Natufian
portrait skulls from Jericho -
see: www.ashmol.ox.ac.uk/ ash/guide/t-text/room32.html.
(I thought the 'Ain Ghazal statues, from Jordan also had shell eyes, but
they were painted - to look like shells)
But what is it about Nassarius gibbosulosus that makes them anything
special? You've found them, nearly 100,000 years apart in the Levant, and
so have the people at Blombos (they illustrate a 'recent' Bushman necklace
made from N. kraussianus in the supporting materials from their site
report).
It seems they're not common along the usual shorelines - the Blombos report
made special mention that they were only found at an estuary 20km from the
cave site, so somebody, 75,000 years ago, took some trouble to get these
particular shells.
Any ideas on the actual local source of the shells at Skhul and Oued
Djabbana?
Could the Skhul shells have come from the Litani river estuary?
There's a bit of a fight going on there at present, but I gather that's not
at all unusual for the local tribes over the past few thousand years.
And can you advise if there are any similar Nassarius along the coast of
East Africa?
I will have to revise my web page at:
http://www.coconutstudio.com/Oldest%20Shell%20Beads.htm
to include your discoveries, and any extra information would be most
welcome.
(Also, pictures and information I steal from other peoples' websites are
usually at least given credit and a link to the original - I don't think
I've done that properly on that webpage - very bad manners - sorry!)
regards
Richard
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